


stress fractures

by Lleavingwonderland



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/M, Light Angst, Percy and Annabeth need a break, Percy and Annabeth need to process their trauma, Post-The Blood of Olympus (Heroes of Olympus)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23925607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lleavingwonderland/pseuds/Lleavingwonderland
Summary: The autumn after surviving Tartarus, Percy and Annabeth are trying to move on with their lives, but they’ve never really talked about what happened. Or what the real problem is.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase & Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson
Comments: 5
Kudos: 116





	stress fractures

**Author's Note:**

> "Stress fractures are tiny cracks in a bone. They're caused by repetitive force, often from overuse — such as repeatedly jumping up and down or running long distances. Stress fractures can also develop from normal use of a bone that's weakened. At first, you might barely notice the pain associated with a stress fracture, but it tends to worsen with time. The tenderness usually starts at a specific spot and decreases during rest. You might have swelling around the painful area. Contact your doctor if your pain becomes severe or if you feel pain even when resting or at night.Although unusual, surgery is sometimes necessary to ensure complete healing of some types of stress fractures."

_tiny cracks._

It’s an afternoon in late September, all dry heat and golden sunlight. There are glossy brochures and one of the retired legionnaires that helps run New Rome University is giving Percy and Annabeth a very detailed tour of the tiny campus, tucked into a quiet corner of the town away from the military camp. They follow their guide down tiled arched hallways and into lecture halls and out into a tiny quad. The California sun feels oppressive even to Percy and he finds himself taking Annabeth’s hand again as she asks their guide something about their architecture labs. A college visit was the most mundane, even boring, thing Percy could think of--it involved voluntarily going to a school on the weekend—and somehow it was still steeped in the strangeness that was the hallmark of his life. There were unicorns running in a field nearby.

He’s jolted back to the matter at hand when Annabeth says his name.

“Sorry, what?” he looks at her, then the woman with the clipboard.

“Do you have any questions? Maybe about the program you’re interested in?” She has a patient voice, clearly she’s used to ADHD demigods, even the Romans weren’t immune.

Shit. His brain blanks, he scans the list of programs on the flier in his hand. He can barely read any of them. “No,” he says, trying for a contented smile. “I think you answered everything.”

“Well if you do think of anything I’m around my office most of the time. And I think you have my information in the packets there.”

“Thank you so much,” says Annabeth. “And are all of the application deadlines in here as well?”

“Yes, though the application is more of a formality. We would love to have you both at NRU.”

Percy finds himself remembering Tartarus again. It’s not that notable really, it’s always there in the back of his mind, like a nightmare he just can’t shake off. He thinks about their conversation, drowning in the river of misery. They talked about college of all things. It had seemed like such a comforting thought then, but coming to the doorstep of it, it wasn’t quite the same.

They walk through New Rome afterwards, buy coffees from Bombilo, go sit in one of the gardens. He hadn’t really thought about it, but this is the first time he’s been back to Camp Jupiter since June. That is to say, the first time he’s been back since he was kidnapped, had his memory wiped and was dumped here alone. Being here again so many months later, even with Annabeth next to him, planning for the future he can’t shake the coldness of it.

“Seaweed Brain, are you with me?”

“Yeah,” he lies.

She rolls her eyes, adoring exasperation. “What program are you going to apply for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You still haven’t decided?”

“They all sound kind of terrible, no offense.”

She pulls back out her packet with the list of majors. “What about management? Or communications?”

“How do you even study communications? I’m communicating with you right now, can I get my degree?”

“Well what about...“ She keeps scanning.

He drops the brochure on the bench next to him and sighs. “It would just be easier if they had surfing.”

Annabeth laughs a little at that, a sound he doesn’t get to hear that often. “The Romans didn’t even have a Navy, why would there be a surfing major?”

“Because sitting in classrooms is a form of torture?”

He never answers her question. He’s stared at lists of majors and careers until he was blue in the face and threw his papers across the room and went for a long walk to get away from them. The future was looming and oppressive in a way that he hadn’t expected it to be. Truth be told he hadn’t expected to have one at all. He had prepared himself to die and be consigned to oblivion on a regular basis since he was 12 years old, so he had never really made college and career planning a priority. And he would probably still be procrastinating it, if it weren’t for Annabeth. Unlike him she seems very excited about all of this, she was the one that came up with the idea to come out here this weekend and visit the school. She was working so hard to help him catch up on all the work he missed in the first part of the year. He went along with it for her, he likes seeing her happy, and believing that everything is ok.

* * *

_a weakened bone._

They have dinner in the mess hall at the camp, a chaotic experience that Annabeth still isn’t used to. They sit with Hazel and Frank and Reyna and hear how things have been at Camp Jupiter. Annabeth still can’t get over the militantness of it all, everyone in armor, the banners and emblems hanging against the walls. And of course the matching tattoos. Her initial shock and revulsion at seeing Percy’s had never quite worn off, and it was all the more obvious here in the middle of the Roman camp. It was so harsh, so permanent, and a part of Percy she would never get back. Not that she isn’t glad to see their fellow quest mates and meet some of the rest of the fifth cohort, but she’s happier when the night is over. The cohorts get in formation and march off to the barracks, and Percy and Annabeth go to their rented rooms in the city. She can’t tell how Percy felt about it, if he would have rather been back in the camp, and she’s too afraid to ask.

The tiny boarding house couldn’t be called a hotel in good conscience—it’s only a converted townhouse with four bedrooms—but it had been set up to help facilitate the exchanges between camps. Folks from Camp Half-Blood wouldn’t be able to fit into any of the barracks, and the praetors’ apartments are nothing like the Big House back home. It’s comfortable, if a bit sparse. They’re both tired, so Percy kisses her goodnight and goes to his room across the hall.

She wants this—to make this work. She lays in bed and stares up at the strange ceiling. The one way she can think of to leave all of the mess of this year behind is to move forward, to just let it all go and work on something new. It was proving as hard a task as any she’d faced before.

She dreaded going to sleep, still. Even after two months the nightmares hadn’t faded. As a demigod she was no stranger to nightmares, gods and spirits hijacking her dreams with foreboding messages, but her new dreams weren’t like that. It was always the same—she was back in tartarus. And it seemed her brain hadn’t run out of fodder yet, whether it was the rivers or the elevator or the hordes of monsters or the house of night she always woke up with her heart racing, chances of going back to sleep absolutely gone.

Right after they escaped, when they were still on the Argo II, she and Percy had talked about the nightmares, but in a way that was more in bruised under-eyes and weighed down silences than words. They hadn’t talked about it again though, and she was trying so hard to leave that in the dark where it belonged, and to not bring it out into the light of her second chance. So it’s not much of a surprise to her when she spends most of the night laying in the dark trying to slow her breathing down to a normal rate, then waiting for sunrise.

When she meets Percy downstairs in the morning he asks her if she slept ok.

She smiles and hugs him and lies.

* * *

_tends to worsen with time._

Three weeks later is October 18th, a Friday. This particular Friday is several things: the end of midterms because of which Percy had not seen Annabeth in over a week, and a two month delay of their one year anniversary. Between the end of the second divine world war in as many years, the loss of Leo, and the anniversary of the Titan war, celebrating on the day had kind of gotten away from them. Percy knew that Annabeth wasn’t the type of girl to break up with him because he forgot their anniversary, but he still felt obligated to do something for it, for her. So something is a date. A real, normal date for real adults where two people who like each other go to a restaurant is a tall order. The last thing that could even be billed as such a date was eating pizza at a cafe in Rome before they almost went to their deaths—not quite the romantic precedent he was hoping to set as a boyfriend.

He meets Annabeth outside her school that evening. She’s wearing a dress that Percy didn’t even know she owned, its black and flowy with long sleeves. He tries to keep from staring to the point of idiocy, but Annabeth is seriously gorgeous in sweaty workout clothes, wearing a dress and tiny earrings with her hair flowing over her shoulders makes her drop dead beautiful—in league with any goddess he’s ever seen.

“You look beautiful,” he says, embracing her. Thats when he notices she has her sword, sheathed and strapped to her back.

“You don’t look too bad yourself,” she says with a smile, appraising what his mother had deigned to be an appropriate outfit for the occasion.

They set off walking, hand in hand. He can’t really read too much into the sword, he has riptide in his pocket. There’s little reason to believe that all the gods and monsters in the five boroughs of New York would stop harassing them tonight, they had certainly taken every opportunity to do so in the past. But he also knows that Annabeth’s little purse is stuffed full of bandages and ambrosia and a canteen of nectar. It’s not even paranoid at this point, it’s just wise.

He asks her about her midterms and she gives him a breakdown of her AP calculus test and why exactly she’s not sure if she got an A or a B. He’s in precalc and he says he’ll be lucky if he eked out a D+ instead of a D-.

He keeps looking back over his shoulder to make sure no one is following them. They get seated at a table in the middle of the restaurant. It’s Friday at dinner, so it’s reasonably crowded but he still feels exposed. He sits with his back to the entrance, watching the waiters come and go. He notices Annabeth doing the same thing, watching over his shoulder for threats. He has to keep forcing himself to stop bouncing his leg—he does it enough normally without this many nerves—but the table keeps shaking even when he stops. Annabeth is doing the same thing.

It’s such second nature neither of them even says anything about it: scanning for threats, watching the other’s back, bringing weapons to a dinner date. This was supposed to be an enjoyable evening, relaxing, romantic. They have all the form but not the substance. They skirt around conversation topics like roadside bombs. There used to be a joy in their shared history, bright moments even in the darkest and scariest quests but something has changed, turned it all inside out. So they talk about school and the weather and a movie that’s coming out next week. Maybe they’ll go see it. Maybe they’ll wait till they can stream it from the safety of Percy’s apartment.

Percy makes a joke out of horrendously mispronouncing the names of menu items and Annabeth laughs so hard she almost spits out her water. Until someone in the recesses of the kitchen shatters a dish and they both jump, reaching for their swords.

“Just broken plates probably,” Annabeth says, settling back down.

“Yeah, probably,” he agrees, and goes back to scanning the crowd.

They’re safe. No monsters materialize, no rogue gods show up requesting aid, and no other demigods drag them into a quest. They walk through central park at dusk.

The sun sets early this late in the year.

* * *

_swelling around the painful area._

By the time November comes around they haven’t seen much of each other. Between Annabeth’s class load and Percy’s extra catch up, they’re both buried in work. But for two people who aren’t even supposed to own cellphones, they’ve fallen asleep on FaceTime calls a lot. Percy asks her if she’s going to her dad’s for thanksgiving, she says she doesn’t know. Then she hears Sally yelling in the background “Tell her she’s welcome to stay with us!” and even though Percy says “Gods, stop eavesdropping!” and closes his bedroom door, he extends the invitation. Annabeth accepts, trying not to grin like an idiot too much.

When Annabeth’s school lets out for the break she packs her backpack and bundles up to take the subway to Percy’s. She’s spent enough time over there to where she doesn’t feel awkward about staying. And she spent enough agonizing afternoons with Sally, during the first half of this year while Percy was gone, that she feels closer to her than to her own mother. Disturbingly enough she probably has spent more time with Sally than Athena, though it’s not even abnormal for a godly parent. Athena just happened to be harsher than most, and the fact that Annabeth didn’t have much of a relationship with her mortal parent compounded the issue. Percy was so lucky. But, so was she.

She’s barely knocked on the door when Sally opens it wide and wraps her in a hug fit to thaw the New York winter.

“Its so good to see you, Annabeth,” she says.

“You, too. Thanks for inviting me.”

“Don’t mention it,” she says, “You’re part of the family.”

That’s still ringing in her head later that night after dinner after Sally and Paul have gone to bed when she and Percy are sitting on the couch watching some movie on TV. He fell asleep not too far into it and she’s hardly paying attention. She’s not sure quite when it started or why but there’s tears on her face, a quiet sorrow. She feels so alone—which is absolutely bizarre and nonsensical because she was welcomed into this home, hell her boyfriend is asleep next to her. She wants to be worthy of it, the very real love she’s receiving, but she doesn’t feel like it. She feels like there’s a barrier between her and the rest of the world, even Percy. They can see her and talk to her but she can’t touch them, can’t be with them fully. There’s something in the way, She has one foot in another world, and she is so scared of being dragged back into it. She wants to stay here. Like this. Forever. Her and Percy alone in a cozy apartment with nothing but the glow of the television and the quiet buzz of city traffic out the window.

She dries her eyes with the sleeves of the hoodie she’s wearing before Percy fully wakes back up. He sleepily kisses her and she tells herself she has nothing to worry about.

* * *

_pain even when resting._

On the Friday a week before Christmas, once both of their schools end and Percy and Annabeth throw duffle bags into the trunk of Paul’s Prius and make the drive out to Camp Half-Blood. Annabeth is unusually quiet and he’s tired so they skip through Long Island’s radio stations, stopping only on songs they like or want to make fun of. They haven’t driven to camp, weirdly enough, since last Christmas. Percy keeps thinking about that, about the glowing lights and dusting of snow and looking forward to their first Christmas together without a war in the background, only to wake up months later surrounded by wolves with only the faintest idea that Annabeth even existed. He wonders if she’s thinking about the same thing. He’s sure his mom was, judging from the death grip of a hug she had given him before handing him the car keys, and the “Come home safe”. There were a lot of hard things about his life, but knowing that he hurt his mom was one of the hardest.

They park the Prius next to the camp vans outside the Big House and make the track up to the cabins. Percy’s is just as he left it in August, and as empty as ever. He doesn’t even bother to unpack, just throws his bag down and goes looking for the others. Jason and Piper are visiting from California, just for the weekend before they go back to LA. They’re great. And life in LA is great. Annabeth and Piper wander off chatting and laughing. Percy and Jason end up in the sword arena, doing what they know.

That evening after dinner they end up back at the Big House, a bunch of the old timers all coupled off now. Even Nico di Angelo and Will Solace seem to have a thing going. Percy sits there, with Annabeth and the rest of them, listening to stories from the year rounders and people reminiscing on the war like it had just been the one battle. Finally he kisses Annabeth on the cheek and excuses himself under the pretense of being tired, and even though Clarisse heckles him as Old Man Jackson going to bed so early, he still goes. He goes and he sits in his cabin alone with the windows open to Long Island Sound. He can’t make himself just sit there and pretend. Pretend that it’s ok, that he’s ok, that he’s ready for the next quest, none of it. Everything is different now. He hasn’t been at camp for over a year, he got a bead for this summer even though he spent most of it in Rome and Greece (and hell), but the routines--archery practice and capture the flag and meals in the dining pavilion--don’t come as easily as they used to. He throws himself into them anyway, because they’re here for the whole week. And Camp Half-Blood is where he belongs, at least that’s what he tells himself. This is his second home. It always has been. Why does it feel so different? Why did the silver lining of his life turn to smoky gray and dissipate?

Since they’re split into cabins for activities he doesn’t spend as much time with Annabeth as he would otherwise, at least that’s the excuse he gives himself. He finds himself staring at her across the dining pavilion like he’s still 14 and she’s his best friend and questing mate not the very world itself. She must have caught him staring because that night after the campfire there’s a knock at his door.

“Haven’t seen much of you, Seaweed Brain,” she says, stepping inside out of the chill.

“I know, sorry. It’s just crazy being back after…” There’s something there, in the silence, waiting to be said. He wonders how to put the clusterfuck of this week into words that make sense and that don’t sound like there’s something irreparably broken in him. He doesn’t have to worry for too long, because Annabeth steps closer and kisses him. It’s not a chaste good-night, see-you-at-breakfast kiss: her hands are in his hair and he’s kissing her back, insistent, searching for something.

He loves her.

She kisses him till his lips are bruised.

He still feels like he’s missing something when she has to leave at curfew. And they never do speak about being back at camp. He’s sure something is up with Annabeth too when he notices she’s not scraping her food into the fire at meals anymore. Maybe he just didn’t see it.

“You ok?” he asks her quietly, they’re the last two lingering after a campfire. She’s leaning on his shoulder and staring into the flames like they hold secrets.

“Course,” she replies.

* * *

_surgery._

The next day is their second to last full day at camp before heading back into the city for Christmas. It can’t come soon enough for Percy. He woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. He just laid there, tracing the wood grain on his bunk with his eyes and thinking. He got Annabeth a knife for Christmas, had one of the Hephaestus kids make it for him since she lost hers. But now he’s wondering if that’s a bad idea, if the only reason she was so partial to her knife was because of Luke. Would a replacement just dredge up bad memories?

And how does he not know? How have they not talked about how she only fights with that wicked looking bone sword now? How have they managed to spend five months skirting around Tartarus like they could ignore it when it was a rancid rotting thing between them, the longer it was let alone the fouler it became. And, with the sort of clarity that only comes in the middle of the night, he realizes this is what is wrong. He has to fix it, before they even leave. He’ll talk to her. They need to be on the same page again. He’s felt like he’s been alone all week, but Annabeth has been right there, like she always has.

Just when the windows are staring to lighten with dawn, Annabeth knocks on his door. She’s dressed. It looks like she hasn’t slept at all.

“Oh my gods,” he says, “What are you doing up this early?”

“You weren’t asleep either,” she says, not a question. She sits down in the floor across from his bunk. “Percy, we need to talk.”

Shit. He’s torn between _What did I do?_ and _What’s wrong?_ It turns out Annabeth doesn’t wait for him to ask.

“I don’t sleep anymore,” she says, “I haven’t slept all the way through a night since Tartarus. Nothing makes any goddamn sense.”

He slowly sits down in the floor across from her. “We never really talked about it.”

“No!” She looks so desperate. “And I feel like I’m going crazy. It’s like I never left. I can’t do this on my own, Percy. Fuck, fuck. Tell me you know what I’m talking about.”

He nods, his throat closing over weak words he never let out before. “I feel like I came back to a different life than the one I left last year. Everything that happened…what we did. I end up back in Tartarus every night.”

“I’ve been trying so hard, but it’s just different this time. And you’re the only one—you’re the only one who knows what happened.”

Percy knows what Annabeth looks like when she’s fighting off tears and losing. She looks like this. The dam breaks. For both of them. Because it’s not just Tartarus. It’s the fact that five months into their relationship Percy was gone. They don’t know how to be together. It’s the fact that he’s a Greek and a New Yorker and he has Roman marks burned into his skin. He can’t forget it’s there—he has to wear sleeves to cover it because he’s in high school and his school doesn’t allow tattoos. Annabeth says, “Some days when I haven’t heard from you I think you’re gone again” and “You don’t know what that’s like. Everyone else was so concerned with building the Argo and setting up for the quest and I was still in hell. It didn’t matter to me that you were in Rome it mattered that you weren’t here.”

When they hit Tartarus the sun has risen but it feels darker than ever. “I thought we were never gonna make it out,” he says quietly. “I thought we were gonna die down there.”

Annabeth moves to sit beside him, takes his hand. “Percy, I keep seeing you, drowning, dying in my arms, staring down _him_.” He’s sure she means Tartarus himself, somethings are too evil to speak even in the daylight.

He can’t offer a response. He sees the same things. He sees the fear in her eyes and a darkness inside himself he is so afraid will never go away.

“And what did we do it for?” she asks, voice broken to delirium, “A statue the gods could have moved with the snap of a finger. To close a broken door that they created. I swear I’ll never forgive them for what they did to us, for what they made us give.”

It feels almost dangerous to say in camp, on land set out for the gods, but she says it anyway. Whispered words over their interlocked hands. The girl who has towering pride that offends the gods and the boy who would tear the world down before seeing a love suffer, they meet in the middle.

The gods caused all this.

It sounds mutinous, like something Luke would have said. It doesn’t shock Percy. Far from it. It almost feels like the barrier is finally gone. So he says something he has been too afraid to give voice to for the past six months. He thought it like a spark that starts a wildfire the night they fell asleep in each other’s arms on the Argo, and now he lets it out: “What if we left?”

Annabeth looks up at him. “Left?”

“What if we just packed and went back to the city right now and never came back? What if we could leave all of this behind? Hell, renounce the gods and go to a mortal college and get jobs and live past 25.”

It sounds ridiculous out loud. He knows it does. They had no say in their parentage coming in, why should they have a say going out?

Annabeth doesn’t say anything immediately, but she’s thinking. Hard. He sees her eyebrows furrow and her lips purse. He let out the depth of his secrets. He hopes, dearly, that she wants the same thing. Because it doesn’t matter either way—he would do whatever she said, follow her into hell all over again, but what if they didn’t have to. He knows it’s a tall order. He didn’t get pulled into this world until he was in the sixth grade. Annabeth has been living it since she was six years old. In the horrible silence he starts to wonder if he’s gone too far, if he can reach out and take the words back.

“You’d really do that?” she whispers.

He replies immediately: “Not without you.”

Annabeth is a consummate planner. Even in the face of treacherous blasphemy she says, “We have to talk this through.”

“Okay,” he says.

“We’d be losing everything, our identities.”

“I know,” he says.

“Our entire way of life. You’re ready to let all this go?”

“Annabeth,” he says. “I won’t need any of it.”

_Not if you’re with me._

She meets his eye, calling his bluff on no sleep. “I have lost everything before. Everything and everyone. I—Percy, I can’t lose you.”

“I’m right here.”

“No, no you don’t understand. We have to get this right. I can’t imagine a version of my life where you’re not in it.”

“Like you said before, about building something permanent?” he asks, tentatively.

“Don’t you feel the same way?”

The question sweeps him off his feet, but his answer has been the same for the last 3 years ever since he lost Annabeth the first time he knew. His feelings for her weren’t a haphazard teenage crush anymore, maybe that was why he was so cautious, so scared to mess anything up.

“Annabeth, you know,” he says.

“I want you to tell me.”

He has never been good with words, so he says something he already said before: “I told you never again. You’re not getting away from me ever again. It still stands. I will do anything, anything, the rest of my life…” He fades off, choked with tears stumbling over his own words. “I love you.”

“I love you” she says back, when he meets her eyes she’s crying too.

He can’t take it anymore, surges forward and clings to her like a drowning man. She hugs him back fiercely, fingernails digging into his shoulder blades.

“We got a shitty lot” she says, muffled into his shoulder.

They’re just two scarred up child soldiers turned lovers, it’s them against the rest of the world.

They leave during breakfast. If anyone notices their absence no one raises an alarm. Annabeth stops at her cabin, head spinning, to get her bag. She’s not used to having sure things. For a half-blood nothing is sure, not even survival. So it feels like a drug to meet Percy outside, with his bag slung over his shoulder, and say “Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> the end of boo was cute but rick was wrong. also zeus is the big bad.


End file.
